The International History Review

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The British Left in the Problems of Peace Lectures,

1926–38: Diversity that E.H. Carr Ignored

Peter Lamb

To cite this article: Peter Lamb (2014) The British Left in the Problems�of�Peace Lectures,
1926–38: Diversity that E.H. Carr Ignored, The International History Review, 36:3, 530-549, DOI:
10.1080/07075332.2013.820775

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Published online: 13 Sep 2013.

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The International History Review, 2014
Vol. 36, No. 3, 530–549, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2013.820775

The British Left in the Problems of Peace Lectures, 1926–38: Diversity

that E.H. Carr Ignored
Peter Lamb*

The proceedings of the Problems of Peace conferences held annually at the League
of Nations headquarters in Geneva from 1926 to 1938 included lectures from an
array of ideological positions. Some contributors were from the Left, ranging
from moderate liberal socialists to the more firmly anti-capitalist thinkers. Those
of the latter category presented challenges to the existing international order,
holding views that bore some affinities to E.H. Carr’s beliefs. They were, however,
unlike Carr, committed to liberal-democratic processes as a means to change.
Nevertheless, in the turbulent environment of the inter-war years optimism gave
way to anxiety among many on the Left. A wider division between the moderate
and more radical British democratic socialists emerged. Some thinkers reposi-
tioned themselves within the broader Left. These different positions and shifts are
evident in the Problems of Peace lectures, and this helps expose the limitations of
Carr’s binary utopianism/realism division of inter-war international thought. A
weakness of the socialists in question is that the demands for change are conven-
tional and thus undeveloped where the real have-not peoples of the empires are
concerned. Nevertheless, by ignoring the lectures Carr neglected diversity and
innovation in the internationalism of the British inter-war Left.
Keywords: internationalist; socialist; liberal; democratic; sovereignty

The tendency to neglect diversity and change on the Left in international

thought between the First and Second World Wars was for many years entrenched
in International Relations (IR) discourse. E.H. Carr’s hugely influential book The
Twenty Years’ Crisis helped this situation to emerge by locating the Left within a
broad utopian category of thought. A binary division came to be perceived between
realist and utopian/idealist categories.1 Such a division has, however, been called
into question since the late 1990s by scholars seeking a better understanding of such
inter-war discourse. Closer attention has been paid to diversity.2 This includes a
focus on the array of positions taken by British left-wing thinkers.3 The aim of the
present paper is to draw attention to contributions of the British Left to the proceed-
ings of the annual Problems of Peace conference, held by the Geneva Institute of
International Relations from 1926 to 1938.
Reflection on these contributions is useful for three reasons. First, they represent
the broader picture of diversity and change on the British Left during the period.
Second, they help illustrate the limitations of Carr’s portrayal of the inter-war Left
as a single body viewing domestic and international politics in terms of harmony of
interests without addressing the fundamental problems of capitalism. Third, they

*Email: p.h.lamb@staffs.ac.uk

Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis

 The International History Review 531

illustrate that some on the democratic Left argued that both capitalism and the sys-
tem of sovereign nation-states must give way to a new form of world organisation.
Thus, the view that there is a harmony of interests in the existing society and interna-
tional system was by no means universally held by the Left. A weakness of these con-
tributions was, however, the conventional and thus undeveloped nature of calls for
change to empower the real have-not peoples of the empires. In that respect criticism
rather than neglect of the democratic-socialist alternative to Idealism was warranted.
Nevertheless, an unfortunate consequence of this neglect is that Carr’s Twenty Years’
Crisis has helped conceal the diversity and quality of internationalism among British
democratic socialists. What the Problems of Peace lectures illustrate is considerable
dissatisfaction on the Left with ideas that Carr would label ‘utopian’.
After brief discussions of first the Geneva Institute and second the concept of the
Left, this paper focuses in turn on a number of significant contributions from the
radical democratic Left to the Problems of Peace conferences. Each of these contribu-
tions is worthy of attention for presenting important points that may go unnoticed
by scholars who, after reading Carr’s work, determine that the inter-war Left had
nothing of note to say. The first contributor to be discussed will be Harold Laski.
This reflects his growing reputation as a major IR thinker of the inter-war years: a
reputation that has been a significant factor in exposing the limitations of portraying
non-realist thought of the period in terms of a broad utopian category. Laski was the
most innovative and scholarly of the thinkers of the Left to contribute to this annual
series of lectures at Geneva. By discussing him first the significance of some of the
points made by other socialist international thinkers at the conferences may be fur-
ther appreciated.

The Geneva Institute of International Relations

The participants in the Geneva Institute’s Problems of Peace conferences included
League of Nations officials, politicians, academics, and other intellectuals. A range
of ideological positions was represented at the conferences, ranging from liberal con-
servatism to radical democratic socialism. Some of the most prominent international
thinkers of the period gave lectures including Gilbert Murray, Alfred Zimmern,
Norman Angell, Hersch Lauterpacht, Philip Noel-Baker, C. Delisle Burns, William
Rappard, Salvador de Madariaga, Henry Noel Brailsford, and Laski. Whilst many
of those who contributed were criticised by Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis this was
not for their lectures at the conferences. In fact, although there is evidence that Carr
was familiar with the Problems of Peace volumes, their contents receive no mention
at all in that book.4 Based on Western liberal morality and parliamentary democ-
racy, the richness of the proceedings escaped his focus. The collection of concise
contributions to the conferences provides a useful summary of democratic interna-
tionalist debate during the period.
The Institute began as a Summer School held by the British League of Nations
Union. Its purpose was to study the constitution and working of the League. The
ideas of US President Woodrow Wilson had of course been hugely influential in the
formation of the League.5 Several US organisations became involved and the School
was transformed into the Institute. The scope of its interests was subsequently wid-
ened to cover international affairs more generally.6 The lectures, according to the
anonymous editor of the proceedings of the first Problems of Peace conference in
1926, would not only illustrate the organisation, growth, and working of the League,
532 P. Lamb

but also discuss major international problems, including those surrounding the prin-
ciple of sovereignty, with which the League was designed to work.7 The continuing
Anglo-American prominence in the conferences would have been less than attractive
to Carr, who had attended the post-war peace conference as a diplomat, and was out-
raged at what he perceived as its unfairness.8 In 1935, on the basis of his view that
liberal morality would not be conducive to fundamental socio-economic change,
Carr considered that attempts to organise the existing system of nation-states into an
international community to prevent war would fare no better than the League of
Peace and Freedom which, founded in Geneva in 1867, became an ineffective institu-
tion because of disagreement between radicals and conservatives.9 The following
year Carr continued to oppose the peace settlement that had brought the League
into being.10
Carr looked forward in the long term to a new international order.11 Nevertheless,
he would have opposed even the more radical contributions of democratic socialists to
the Problems of Peace lectures. The political philosophies of those authors retained a
liberal, anti-authoritarian element and were staunchly committed to parliamentary
democracy. One of Carr’s main aims in The Twenty Years’ Crisis was to attack the
logic and morality of liberal democracy. As he would later concede, in the 1920s
he had begun to realise that the liberal moralistic ideology was not an absolute, to be
taken for granted.12 From that period onwards he developed what he referred to as a
‘sweeping criticism of western liberalism’.13 The economic crisis indicated the bank-
ruptcy of capitalism; free trade was a doctrine of the powerful states and the entire
system was propped up by a ‘moralistic façade’.14 For him, this liberal morality
extended to US, British, and French hegemony, which was expressed in the morality
of the League even though the United States was not a member.15 He acknowledged
that force was not always employed to protect vested interests. Under the nineteenth-
century system of liberalism ‘subtler forms of compulsion successfully concealed from
the unsophisticated the continuous but silent workings of political power; and in
democracies at any rate this concealment was still partially effective.’16 Significantly,
even the more radical British democratic socialists such as Laski and Clement
Attlee in the 1930s insisted that revolutionary change should be achieved through
parliamentary, democratic norms and means.17 Hence, Carr would have considered
their efforts likely to be forestalled by capitalist, liberal morality. Nevertheless, to
ignore the contributions of the radical wing of democratic socialism as he did meant
that the charge of utopianism was not backed up by proper analysis.
Contrary to Carr’s picture in The Twenty Years’ Crisis of utopian naivet e among
supporters of the League, by the mid-1930s there was an increasingly pessimistic
aura in Geneva, expressed in some of the editorial notes and introductions to the
Problems of Peace volumes. The anonymous editor of the 1931 lectures, for example,
conceded that there was ‘still idealism in Geneva, but it is of a severely practical
kind’, a point he repeated the following year.18 The 1932 conference, the Editor
added in the first of these two introductions, would study what he described as ‘the
World Crisis’.19 An unattributed editorial note at the beginning of the 1936 proceed-
ings published the following year suggested that the book was appearing ‘at a time
when all thinking men and women are examining the reasons why the League has
failed as an instrument for preserving peace’.20 In his introduction to the proceedings
of 1937, published the following year, the Under Secretary-General of the League
Frank Walters expressed his concern that the League may cease to exist in its extant
form.21 The anonymous introduction to the final proceedings held and published in
 The International History Review 533

1938 said: ‘One problem transcends and determines all the rest, the problem of main-
taining peace itself.’22
Over the same period a greater division emerged between the moderate and radi-
cal wings of British democratic socialism. The World Crisis mentioned by the Editor
in 1932 was the economic crisis that led to the fall of the British Labour government
of 1929–31.23 The Crisis, the spread of nationalism and Fascism in many parts of the
world, and the failure of the League to resolve the problems led many on the radical
wing of British democratic socialism to begin to consider that a more fundamental
transformation of state, society, and the international system would be necessary to
replace capitalism.24 As will be discussed later in this article, such a shift to the Left
was reflected in the internationalist views of Laski and Konni Zilliacus expressed at
the conferences in Geneva. They, along with Brailsford, Attlee, Herbert Morrison,
and Leonard Barnes held views that differed radically from the sort of thought char-
acterised by Carr’s utopian category. Their views, which were largely overlooked for
several decades after Carr published The Twenty Years’ Crisis, thus comprise a signif-
icant alternative to mainstream IR theory.

Utopianism and the Left

‘Left’ is, of course, a contested term, there being no universal agreement as to points
upon a spectrum where its realm begins and ends. Carr’s correlation of the Left with
utopianism meant that the ‘utopian’ label was attached to a wide range of thinkers
and politicians the common weakness of whom, in his view, was not to recognise
that states are far more likely to conflict than co-operate with one another.25
Utopians, he insisted, treated purpose as ‘the only relevant fact’ or ‘the sole ultimate
fact’, thus constantly couching ‘optative propositions in the indicative mood’.26 They
believed that the highest interest of the individual and the highest interest of the com-
munity naturally coincided. In ‘pursuing his own interest, the individual pursues that
of the community, and in promoting the interest of the community he promotes his
own’.27 Because of the international harmony of interests, peace could be maintained
by means of co-operation and organisation. Carr suggested that these views were
common in League of Nations circles, there being an eagerness ‘to avoid the concrete
in favour of the abstract generalizations’.28 A problem, however, with attempting to
accommodate the Left in general into this utopian category is that it glosses over the
growing conviction among some thinkers of the Left in the 1930s that their goals
could not be achieved without fundamental social and economic change. How then
could Carr conceive of the Left in such terms?
To begin to address this question one should focus on Carr’s use of dichotomous
and three-sided anthropocentric metaphors to persuade readers to accept his criti-
cism of the international thought of the inter-war years.29 The use of such metaphors
drew on the cognitive tendency of people to perceive diversity in binary terms. This
indeed has been the case regarding ideological diversity in Left/Right terms since the
division was first used at the beginning of the French Revolution, when Estates-
General members of the third estate, who favoured a reduction of monarchical
power, sat on the left of the Chairman.30 Since that time, people and movements
advocating varying sorts and degrees of egalitarianism have been described as being
of the Left.
Nevertheless, when the Right–Left spectrum is employed the boundaries between
these categories are not clearly defined. One can, by drawing on the work of Michael
534 P. Lamb

Freeden, identify ideological overlap; liberalism, for example, encompasses a wide

range of positions that, while sharing core tenets, also differ in that they variously
accept ideas held by adherents to conservatism or socialism.31 Indeed, the term
‘Centre’ is often employed to denote moderate ideological positions that may lean
towards or encroach upon the Left or Right. Using this traditional Right-Left spec-
trum one can locate those who sought to defend the existing socio-economic order
after the First World War firmly on the Right. At the left of centre would be those
variously described as collectivist liberals or liberal socialists who since the late nine-
teenth century had become divided from the traditional free-trade liberals.32 Those
among the liberal socialists who took a positive view of human potential to establish
an international framework of law and standards are sometimes described as liberal
internationalists.33 C. Delisle Burns can be located at this intersection of liberalism
and socialism. For instance, at the 1929 Problems of Peace conference he discussed
the economic causes of war but did not associate economic issues with the problems
of class division.34 At the conference in 1932 he argued that, to make the League
work as a state-system for the maintenance of peace, people in key positions in busi-
ness and public affairs would need to refrain from atavistic thinking and instead plan
on the basis of consumption rather than production and costs.35 For the League to
operate as it should, he suggested at the conference the following year, its supporters
would need to develop a new belief in the common good.36
The internationalist views of the British democratic Left ranged from liberal
socialists such as Burns at the centre to those who considered that class division
made a more fundamental challenge to capitalism necessary. Those within this broad
Left can, as Lucian Ashworth has recently suggested, be considered in terms of a sub-
culture competing in the newly developing intellectual trading zone of international
relations. Those on the Centre Left and those more firmly on the Left became more
distinct as wings of that subculture during periods of crisis.37 Moreover, in such
times of crisis some thinkers become more firmly located on the socialist wing, as
was the case with Laski and Zilliacus, who in the 1920s believed strongly in the capa-
bilities of the League but became more radical in the 1930s.
Even the radicals in the British democratic-socialist movement were to a large
degree liberal. The strong liberal influence on British democratic socialism was
expressed in philosophical terms by E. F. Carritt in his lecture at the final Problems
of Peace conference in 1938. An Oxford philosopher, Carritt was an egalitarian
thinker who considered liberty and equality to be inseparable. Economic equality,
political equality, and equality before the law were, in his view, likewise insepara-
ble.38 Focusing in his lecture on the concepts of obedience and political obligation,
he considered whether there was or could be an international power that one should
always obey.39 We should, he suggested, obey a world authority if it were to fulfil
two purposes: first, the promotion of happiness in terms of welfare and security, thus
answering utilitarian theory; second, the promotion of freedom and equality as
demanded by natural-rights theory. States should thus have two qualities: socialist
economy and freedom.40
Taking Carritt’s position as representative in philosophical terms of the core ten-
ets of democratic socialism in Britain during the period, one can locate socialists who
insisted that such a league must be based on a new, egalitarian socio-economic order
on the radical wing. Significantly, in the 1930s positions that may have been consid-
ered radical in the previous decade would be perceived as being closer to the Centre
if they did not deem fundamental social and economic change necessary. The
 The International History Review 535

different positions within this broad socialist church are, furthermore, not insulated
from one another or from other ideological influences; the ideas of one group often
influence those who fit more neatly into another. Indeed, the influence of anarchism
can be detected upon the democratic socialist thought of Laski in the Problems of
Peace conferences.41 Nevertheless, anarchists themselves did not contribute to the
conferences, nor did British Communists such as R. Palme Dutt who wrote a major
study of international politics covering the 1920s and 1930s.42 Those who contrib-
uted from the Left took a democratic-socialist approach.
The Left-Right spectrum may seem ambiguous in situations where, for example,
Josef Stalin is referred to as a left-wing dictator; but it is perhaps telling that such use
of ‘Left’ leads to confusion over the meaning of that term. Furthermore, in 1924
Stalin drew upon Lenin’s pamphlet Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder
written four years earlier during the authoritarian phase that its author deemed nec-
essary in order to defend the revolution, to justify dictatorship and vanguard rule.43
Stalin thus interpreted ‘Left’ in the usual way to signify opponents who sought to
escape domination and deprivation. Carr had long been enthusiastic about the Bol-
shevik Revolution and was impressed by the achievements of Stalin’s Soviet Union,
which he did not associate with the Left.44 Having taken power, he stressed, the
Bolsheviks had converted from Left to Right.45 For Carr, the Left, the intellectual
superiority of which he considered never to have been in doubt, was utopian and
unable to translate its theory into practice. When leftist parties gained power they
subsequently moved to the Right.46 Carr’s use of the term ‘utopian’ referred to those
who believed that, because of the harmony of interests, significant progress could be
achieved without fundamental socio-economic change.47 Hence, this does not
account for those democratic socialists who did see the need for such change. This is
a significant shortcoming of The Twenty Years’ Crisis.
Carr’s disregard for the democratic-socialist contributions of writers such as
Laski to the Problems of Peace conferences may seem curious in that, like they, he
considered fundamental social change to be required in order to address the lack of
planning and regulation that characterised the liberal economy. Such change, he
believed, was necessary in order to reform the international system in such a manner
that would facilitate peace.48 Unlike the democratic Left, however, Carr had become
deeply sceptical of the possibility of transformation by parliamentary democratic
means.49 His vision was one of replacement of the existing forms of democracy,
which served individual interests, with mass democracy, whereby government would
be by and for the whole community.50 He thus neglected some innovative interna-
tional thought. Laski’s contributions are particularly noteworthy in this respect
because of their author’s proposals for specific radical changes to the international
political system.

Laski
As Professor at the London School of Economics and Labour Party activist, Laski
was among the most prominent socialist internationalists of the period.51 The extent
to which he differed from those who fit more neatly into Carr’s utopian category may
be illustrated by comments that Laski and the liberal socialist Leonard Woolf made
several years before Carr started work on The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Conventionally,
Woolf is considered to be an Idealist.52 In 1933 he edited The Intelligent Man’s Way
to Prevent War, which included essays by eminent international thinkers including
536 P. Lamb

Angell, Laski, and Murray. ‘A discussion of the League of Nations, disarmament,

arbitration, international co-operation, and the prevention of war will’, Woolf sug-
gested in his Introduction, ‘seem to many people at the moment academically
utopian.’53 As Woolf commented, the conclusion to Laski’s essay, which he described
as ‘the most controversial of all the chapters in the book’, was that the prevention of
war required the capitalist world to be replaced by one based on socialism.54 In that
essay Laski considered utopian the belief that dealing merely with the symptoms of
the fundamental economic problems could prevent war.55 Laski sought to deal with
the roots of the problems.
Placing Laski’s views into context within the broader socialist subculture of his
times in Britain, one may note that Zimmern’s liberal socialism bore affinities to
Carr’s utopian category. In his lecture at the first Problems of Peace conference in
1926, Zimmern argued that the success of the League depended upon the develop-
ment of an international mind. The League was not simply an organisation but also
a centre of thought. International thinking needed to be open-minded, having a habit
of intellectual integrity. Such thinking, moreover, should be characterised by a public
spirit.56 This combination of institutional and moral elements is also evident in his
lecture at the 1931 conference, in which he criticised aspirations for Europeanism
and a world community, supporting instead the League’s structure of co-operating
states, which was helping to build ‘the community of communities’. Europeanism
not only diverted attention from the League’s policy of reducing economic barriers
but also, judging from its ancestry in previous areas with a single government cover-
ing many countries, took power and responsibility away from real communities,
where the natural seat of government resided.57
Nevertheless, Zimmern was not unaware of the difficulties of achieving harmony
and co-operation, thus serving to undermine Carr’s case in The Twenty Years’ Crisis.
Zimmern, who like Angell was one of Carr’s principal targets, stressed at the
Problems of Peace conference of 1928 that people who thought that results could be
achieved in international politics by ‘rose-water methods’ that would inflict no pain
on anybody faced the ‘pitfall of sentimentalism’. Such people assumed that ‘our
international doctors can do their job without hurting’, thus overlooking the fact
that sometimes ‘you even have to use force, as a doctor does.’58 Laski grasped the
horns of this dilemma. He considered it necessary to pursue radical social and eco-
nomic change rather than either accept the status quo or suffer indefinite frustration
in the attempt to achieve co-operation in the existing international environment, the
problems of which were disguised by the veneer of state sovereignty.59 The proposals
he presented, particularly in the second of his two lectures, were more worthy of
attention than was widely recognised for several decades after the ‘twenty years’
crisis’.
In his lecture ‘International Government and National Sovereignty’ in the first
Problems of Peace conference in 1926 Laski declared that he spoke as a socialist who
belonged to the left wing of the socialist movement in England, and would not strive
to be impartial as he did not believe in impartiality at all.60 In his view, thought
which did not demand change was just as partial as that which did. For him, the
most dangerous problem that Europe faced was the clash of economic classes that
divided the people of the continent on artificial premises. The world was a unifying
factor, making boundaries between nation-states difficult to justify. Although the
moral unity of the world was deepening as more people understood the implications
of actual unity, this international unity was being hindered by the sovereign state by
 The International History Review 537

which form nationality was now manifested.61 There was no case in modern history
in which the notion of national honour had been presented as a rational argument.
Analysis of such cases would ‘show that it was in fact the defence of a small group in
the nation whose economic fortunes were unrelated to the national well-being’.62 As
a socialist, he was careful to state that the triumph of the international idea required
the victory not of the League, ‘but of the thing for which the League of Nations
stands’.63 To resolve the problem of exploitation the notion of sovereignty needed to
be undermined and the League’s purpose further developed.64 The League would
need to be more courageous, defying the Great Powers whenever necessary. The
principle of unanimity would need to be replaced with something like a two-thirds
majority and the International Court extended so that individual citizens could sue a
sovereign state. Finally, he advocated far greater and more rigorous control of the
mandates system in order to eliminate exploitation. Carr would criticise the man-
dates system for its inability to genuinely shift power to the exploited.65 Criticising
imperialism Laski did insist in his lecture that people from the powerful countries
were not entitled to make their private fortunes by means of the inhabitants of other
parts of the world bearing the burden and sacrificing their youth.66 In placing his
trust in reform of that system Laski was, however, rather paternalistic in approach
to the empowerment of people living under the empires. For an international social-
ist, this is clearly a shortcoming.
Laski had discussed his ideas for international organisation in far more detail in
the lengthy final chapter of A Grammar of Politics published the previous year.67 In
The Twenty Years’ Crisis Carr quoted Laski’s statement earlier in that book that
‘our civilization is held together by fear rather than by good will.’68 Carr used this
passage to support his view that power was a key feature of politics. What Carr did
not acknowledge was the context of that statement. Laski was criticising the existing
condition of society. ‘The rivalry of States, the war of classes, the clash of colour’,
were, he argued, problems that civilisation faced; the pressing task was to find solu-
tions to those problems. The ‘study of modern politics’ could ‘hardly avoid becoming
an inquiry into the dynamics of peace’.69 When Carr quoted Laski he was misrepre-
senting the latter thinker’s detailed investigation into ways in which the existing inter-
national order may be fundamentally transformed. Laski’s Problems of Peace lecture
of 1926 provided a concise sketch of his position.
At the Problems of Peace conference of 1931 Laski suggested that the view which
regarded states as ‘the final term in the institutional equation’ was ‘necessarily
obsolete’.70 In his view the pluralist principle of functional political organisation
could be applied to the international domain, and thus help to eventually transcend
state sovereignty.71 He was, by this time, moving further to the Left than he had
been in the 1920s. The environment in British politics and society surrounding events
such as the general strike of 1926 and the economic and political crisis of 1931 was
convincing him of the significance of Marxism.72
Stressing that it was vital to go back to first principles, Laski insisted that the
business of government was the satisfaction of human individual need. In modern
society people needed a world community to ensure they enjoyed a system of condi-
tions, which had the status of rights, in order to realise their potential. Without con-
sideration of the rights and duties of individual men and women the happiness of
states was meaningless. International law would need to reflect this point. The prob-
lem of determining the form the world community should take should be approached
‘through the study of the functions it must undertake’.73 Fundamental economic and
538 P. Lamb

political change would be necessary, as neither capitalism nor the present forms of
government were capable of accommodating the appropriate organisational
framework.
Leaving nation-states to act as they deemed fit in areas and issues of common inter-
ests would, Laski predicted, mean that conflict would be sooner or later inevitable.
It was necessary, he went on, ‘to find the concepts of cosmopolitan thinking as the
very basis of security for civilized existence’.74 He presented an international function-
alist approach which recognised the growing intensity and complexity of human rela-
tions in the twentieth century. The view of the state as sovereign was ‘intelligible
enough in a period when the reciprocal relations of states were spasmodic in charac-
ter’.75 Ideas such as the sovereign state and the national state had, though, now
‘reached their apogee’;76 those ideas no longer corresponded to the facts of the contem-
porary world. It was necessary to confront the sovereignty discourse by drawing
on the concept of civitas maxima (universal state). The law of a new society, which
would be binding upon its individual members, should be guided by a philosophy
that would ‘begin by postulating the society of states, the civitas maxima in which all
have their being, as the source from which the competence of all individual states is
derived’.77 Binding as it would be not only on states but also on individual persons,
the new system would both ‘represent the abandonment of the hypothesis of sover-
eignty’78 and give substance to the idea of international equality. It was ‘important to
postulate the non-sovereign character of the State’.79
First, however, capitalism, which was bound to be rooted in conflict and could not
solve the problems of inequality, would need to be replaced by an international egalitar-
ian economic system. Second, it would be necessary to ‘experiment with the possibilities
of functional devolution’. It would be necessary to make things like cotton, coal, wheat,
and gold units of governance in the same way as territorial areas. These units should be
linked with the operations of the League.80 He thus advocated something bearing affini-
ties with the functional approach for which David Mitrany would later be renowned.81
Laski’s functionalism offered an alternative based on the challenge to capitalism. One
might expect Carr to have appreciated such an alternative given that in 1942 he pre-
sented a version of functionalism for ‘the new Europe’ in Conditions of Peace: a book
in which he was concerned to propose solutions to the problems of international rela-
tions that had been the focus of The Twenty Years’ Crisis.82
Laski’s thought was egalitarian and cosmopolitan. As was mentioned above,
however, his thought was lacking in that he did not express a clear and developed
view on how the exploited people in the empire would be empowered to play a signif-
icant role in a new world system. In the 1920s, while he had campaigned for justice
for peoples of the Empire, this was from a paternalist perspective. This did, however,
begin to change in the 1930s when he criticised imperialism not only for its exploita-
tion of people in the colonies, but also because of the undemocratic and inegalitarian
habits it fostered within the imperialist state.83 Around the time of his lecture of 1931
he was involved in negotiations alongside Mohandas Gandhi over the future of
India.84 By 1932 Laski would become a staunch advocate and campaigner for Indian
independence. His lecture had nevertheless failed to convey this growing support.
This failure to properly discuss empowerment of people in the empires and mandated
territories was common among the British democratic Left in the inter-war years. As
will be discussed briefly below, this is evident in the proceedings of the Problems of
Peace conferences, including the lectures of the senior Labour Party politicians
Morrison and Attlee.
 The International History Review 539

Morrison and Attlee

Morrison is usually perceived as very moderate, believing that by means of a mixed
economy a fairer society could be consolidated, and that efficiency, competence, and
effectiveness in pursuing such a society were far more important than high ideals.85
Morrison did, however, aim to achieve substantial socio-economic change. His
socialism was of an incremental and reforming nature, even though those reforms
would be fundamental, transferring as much from private capitalist ownership into
public ownership for public service as possible. The radical aspect of his thought is
evident in his lecture ‘A New Start with the League of Nations’ in 1936 at the elev-
enth Problems of Peace conference, in which his views on collective security were in
some ways closer to those of Carr than to those of the liberal socialists Angell and
Noel-Baker with whom he may be contrasted.
Collective security, suggested Noel-Baker at the Problems of Peace conference of
1935, ‘is to-day the only problem of real importance in foreign affairs, because until
it is solved no Government can formulate an intelligible foreign policy for all the
other international problems with which it is called upon to deal.’86 Angell, in several
lectures to the Problems of Peace conferences, spoke of mutual, international defence
and was critical of the pacifists in his own party.87To take a pacifist stance when
another state does not act similarly would result in the former falling under the
power of the latter.88 He had held and expressed this criticism of pacifism for many
years, arguing that although war was irrational, the absence of defence would invite
powers that had yet to understand and acknowledge such irrationality to exploit this
situation.89 In that respect there is a similarity between Angell’s ideas and those of
Carr. Quoting Lenin, Carr asserted that peace in itself was a meaningless aim.90
Whereas, however, Angell saw aggressive powers as irrational, Carr’s interpretation
was that such aggression was likely to come from ‘have-not’ countries which had
been excluded from the ranks of the powerful. For Carr, some means needed to be
found to bring the have-nots in from the cold.91
Regarding the countries Carr considered as have-nots, in his lecture at the confer-
ence in 1936 Morrison stipulated more stringent conditions than Carr. Morrison sug-
gested that if a group of the democratic states combined their democracy with
socialism the nationalist dictatorships could be offered economic advantages and
security, so long as they reduced and limited armaments and accepted the obligations
of the collective system. A social and international example may thus even prove irre-
sistible to the people living under the Fascist regimes.92
Nevertheless, like Carr, Morrison argued that at present the collective peace sys-
tem for which the League was formed now existed only on paper. The framers of the
Covenant had been ‘conservatives and very moderate progressives who accepted
the fundamentals of the existing social and economic order without question’.93 The
great depression had revealed the difficulty of making the collective peace system
anything more than a paper project within that existing order. Economic nationalism
had become prevalent, even though the nations did not necessarily desire such an
outcome. Due to the pressure of private vested interests those nations were ‘no longer
masters of their own economic policy’.94 In the atmosphere of the depression the
vested interests had been able to thrive on fear and suspicion and had thus been able
to invoke patriotism, frictions, and antagonisms. This necessitated attention to
national defence, which allowed the private interests to generate income and profits.
Morrison’s criticism of prominent attitudes to collective security was significant.
540 P. Lamb

Collective security had, indeed, acquired a mythical quality among the champions of
the League, with a narrative implying that progress was being made to this destina-
tion in face of opposition by foes.95
Turning to Carr, collective security was, indeed, in his view one of the most prom-
inent ideas of the utopians during the twenty years’ crisis.96 In 1936 he had com-
plained that collective security replaced an instrument of national war-making with
one of international war-making.97 Like Morrison, Carr believed that fundamental
change was required for genuine collective security to work.
Unlike Carr, however, Morrison considered that a strong stand for the collective
peace system in response to Japanese, Italian, and German treaty-breaking and
aggression would have set up conditions favourable to the forces of social change
and weakened the defenders of the existing social and economic order’.98 A strong
stand would, however, have required governments to take control of economic
power and made the common good rather than private profit the dominant motive
in the economic life of the country. British and French foreign-policy makers had
abandoned a genuine collective system because they realised that this was so.99 For
Morrison, a new start for the League should thus begin with the aim of a world com-
monwealth, based on democracy, social justice, and racial equality.100
Morrison agreed with the mainstream supporters of the League that it was neces-
sary to strengthen the obligations of the Covenant against aggression and the break-
ing of treaties. As was discussed above, however, Morrison considered that the quest
for collective security would be futile unless the vested interests were challenged. A
prerequisite of peace was economic planning based on public ownership, in pursuit
of the common good. A successful challenge would help governments to participate
in a world conference to discuss security, disarmament, economic change, colonial
issues, and peaceful change. Ultimately, Morrison believed, the League could be
developed into a world commonwealth.101 It was this stance on the need for funda-
mental economic reforms that distinguished his international thought from liberal
socialists closer to the centre.
Carr’s view that the inter-war Left did not sufficiently question the dominance of
the extant major powers can, nevertheless, be applied to Morrison in a certain way.
Morrison assumed that the way to move on from imperialism would be through the
mandates system.102 Although it would involve consultation between the colonial
powers and the dominions, this was a paternalist approach to solving problems of
exploitation and inequality. Hence while Morrison had plans to deal with the coun-
tries identified by Carr as have-nots, such as the Fascist counties, his conventional
approach to the exploited have-not peoples of the empire is characteristic of the
British democratic Left of the period.
Like Morrison, Attlee believed that a collective system needed to be implemented
fully for it to be at all effective. Eventually, he believed, in order to avoid interna-
tional conflict, the system of individual states would need to be replaced with some
sort of world government.103 In 1934, the year before he became leader of the Labour
Party, Attlee delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Socialist View of Peace’ at the ninth
Problems of Peace conference.104 A key issue, for him, was whether peace should be
considered a positive or negative condition.105 His lecture has resonance today in
that it used terminology employed more recently in the discipline of peace studies.106
The socialist view of peace, he suggested, was not of ‘a mere negation, an absence of
War’. Peace to the socialist was ‘a positive condition of human society wherein there
is a realization of the essential unity of mankind and of the common interests of the
 The International History Review 541

great majority of the world’s population’.107 One of the major problems that stood in
the path of progress towards that condition was that of ‘the exaggerated racial claims
put forward by the Nazis and Fascists’. To explain this and other problems of the
1920s and 1930s, such as the ‘Balkanisation of Europe’ and what he called ‘the arous-
ing of Japan, China, India, and the East’, it was necessary to consider economic as
well as political causes. The economic causes provided ‘the soil wherein political
movements grow’.108
For Attlee, in order to satisfy the common interests, and thus achieve a meaning-
ful peace, substantial economic change was required. The ‘only way to strike at the
roots of war’ was ‘to attack simultaneously the twin connected evils of capitalism
and nationalism’.109 He stressed that this must be done democratically, by parlia-
mentary means, within those countries in which such a path was still available and
internationally through the League, for all its weaknesses. The League would need to
be developed into a real world government and be a controlling force in world eco-
nomics, thus dealing with the causes of war. If the League were to collapse then revo-
lutionary action would become the only means available to socialists, who may have
to form an underground movement as was the case in countries where parliamentary
democracy had been abolished by Fascism.110
Attlee shared Morison’s view that a world commonwealth was needed in order to
solve the international problems of the twentieth century.111 However, Attlee’s lec-
ture offers no discussion of the way in which the people exploited in the empires
would contribute to this commonwealth. Attlee was, like Laski, by this time commit-
ted to working with Gandhi to achieve Indian independence.112 Hence, this is a curi-
ous omission that detracts from the radical nature of Attlee’s thought in the 1930s,
especially as he had mentioned the arousing of India and the East.

Zilliacus
Whilst Morrison and Attlee were leading political figures in domestic British politics
in the 1920s and 1930s, their Labour Party colleague Zilliacus held a senior role in
the secretariat at the League. In the decade that followed Zilliacus would shift to the
Left, especially on international issues.113 This position eventually led to his
expulsion from the Party.114 From his earlier perspective in his lecture to the 1929
Problems of Peace conference he challenged the idea that the League had become
ineffective. Stressing that the notion of international anarchy to describe interna-
tional politics was quite new, he reminded his audience that the international law
that prevailed until the First World War dated back only to the Treaty of Westphalia
of 1648. Until then, world unity had been the prominent notion. The League, he
insisted, was ‘the first struggling attempt to return to the ancient and universal tradi-
tion of the unity of mankind’.115 Although state sovereignty had become the key con-
cept in international relations, advances in science in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century had brought about the growth of material and cultural interdepen-
dence. Against this background, through the League’s conferences and conventions,
international law was ‘being developed far more rapidly than ever before and pene-
trating into new fields’.116
In his contribution to the final Problems of Peace conference in 1938, by which
time he had shifted leftwards, Zilliacus introduced himself as a former member of the
League of Nations Secretariat, with a footnote declaring that he had delivered his
lecture from that post, which he had occupied since 1920. He had resigned because
542 P. Lamb

he considered his views incompatible with the continuation of that role.117 The
League, he complained, now followed the standards of its chief government members
rather than the standards of the Covenant.118 Although his belief in the things the
League stood for was as strong as ever, it was necessary first of all to deal with prob-
lems within states. Otherwise, the international issues would not be properly
addressed.119 Echoing criticism by Morrison and Laski of its conservative outlook,
he opined that the League had at the outset been a concession made by conservatism
and plutocracy to President Wilson and the liberal wing of the British delegation to
the peace conference.120 The liberals had, however, ‘overestimated the reality or the
possibility of democracy under our existing economic system’.121 The interests of the
plutocracy were not the same as those of the common people, and in foreign affairs
it was the interests of the former that counted at the expense of the general interests
of the people.
This later position taken by Zilliacus bears affinities to Carr’s analysis of the prob-
lems of democracy within a framework dominated by liberal and capitalist morality
and logic. Nevertheless, Zilliacus sought a solution to the problems of democracy,
and by ignoring the challenges presented by him and other socialists at the Problems
of Peace lectures, Carr missed the opportunity to analyse that proposed solution.
Zilliacus suggested that a close connection was needed between democracy and social
justice on the one hand and some form of world law and order or world government
on the other. To achieve that connection it would be necessary to take sides in the
ideological conflict which was rooted in ‘the claim of the working classes for
social justice and in the resistance to that claim of the plutocracy’.122 Like Laski and
Morrison, he did not believe neutrality to be a genuine option. To sit on the fence
would, for Zilliacus, be to take ‘the side of the defenders of the social status quo’.123

Brailsford and Barnes

The belief held by Zilliacus that the realities of international politics were obscured
was shared by his fellow socialist intellectual Henry Noel Brailsford.124 Brailsford’s
stance regarding British foreign policy was far more radical than that of liberal
socialists such as Burns, for example. At the Problems of Peace conferences of 1927
and 1928 Burns was optimistic that the League may be successful in promoting inter-
nationalism and fostering better relations within the British Commonwealth.125
Brailsford took a very different view. One reality to which he drew attention at the
second Problems of Peace conference in 1927 was the racism inherent in Western
imperialism. Whilst in the West relations between states were perceived to be rela-
tions between nationalities, relations between European states and the empires in the
East were perceived in terms of the colour bar, by which peoples of what was consid-
ered to be the Orient were treated with contempt.126 Brailsford was in effect focusing
upon problems that postcolonial thinkers have more recently discussed in terms of
identity, knowledge, power, marginalisation, and Orientalism. Postcolonial analysis
suggests that the accepted view and treatment of the Orient and its peoples had been
developed through hegemonic representations of knowledge, with discourse serving
to entrench power relations.127
Brailsford’s concerns with such issues were combined in his lecture with a tradi-
tional socialist concern with economic exploitation. Both adults and children in
China had to perform difficult and degrading work for a pittance, resulting in misery
while European investors received huge profits.128 He offered the following advice:
 The International History Review 543

‘Either we subject our imperialism to a liberal education, either we bring it under

international discipline, or infallibly Asia, on the programme of Sun-Yat-Sen, per-
haps very much as Russia is realizing it, will unite.’129 Given Carr’s warning more
than a decade later in The Twenty Years’ Crisis against creating a situation where the
have-nots would challenge the power of the haves130, there may appear to be affini-
ties between their ideas. Their ideas were, however, very different from one another.
Carr advocated some sort of appeasement with the Nazi and Fascist powers, having
yet to grasp that these have-nots would not accept a place in the international com-
munity if accommodated.131 Brailsford was concerned with finding a way to end
colonial exploitation. Nevertheless, they each perceived that a form of nationalism
was emerging in response to exploitation by the dominant powers of the period.
Brailsford predicted that this new form of nationalism was directed against peoples
of the West in general.132 Whilst Brailsford can himself be accused of Orientalism in
thus perceiving Asian unity, his focus on the relations between rich and poor coun-
tries demonstrated a clear understanding of a problem that would later become a
major issue of international relations.
Brailsford influenced the staunch anti-colonialist Barnes. A lecturer in Education
at the University of Liverpool, Barnes took particular interest in the colonial situa-
tion in Africa.133 As he acknowledged in his lecture on imperialism at the Problems
of Peace conference in 1936, he was among those in the 1930s who considered the dis-
tinction between haves and have-nots among powerful Western states (a distinction
that Carr would of course adopt) to be less than helpful in understanding the pros-
pects for peaceful international relations. The reallocation of colonial territory would
fail to deal with the fundamental problem of imperialism itself.134 In an international
system featuring imperialism, collective security would be unachievable. Countries
like Germany, Italy, Japan, and Poland, he insisted, had ‘no interest whatever in
sharing the burden of defence of the British and French Empires, and it is unreason-
able to expect them to regard those Empires with any feelings but envy and covet-
ousness’.135 If nations were to pool their defences, then economic and other
advantages which presently accrued from empires would need to be pooled centrally.
Imperialism was only possible and necessary because of the capitalist system of pro-
duction. It was this system that was the fundamental problem for collective security.
For a settled international peace, imperialism would need to give way to a central
world authority, a role the League was unable to fulfil. The abolition of imperialism
and exploitation, which operated in the interests of the small but dominating classes
only, would also return the colonies to the peoples to whom they rightly belonged.136
According to Barnes, some of the colonies were, realistically, ready for indepen-
dence almost immediately: ‘India, Ceylon, some of the West Indian islands, and per-
haps the Gold Coast are parts of the British Empire to which this principle cold be
applied with only the briefest of transitions.’137 However others, he argued, were not
ready for self-government and would need for some time to be under the guidance of
the mandates system or something similar, which would transform into a system of
international trusteeship. He was confident that, were it to be returned to power in
Britain, the Labour Party would apply this policy, which it had already declared.138
This should lead to natural resources being under public ownership in the new indepen-
dent countries, with funding coming from an internationalised League loans authority.
Although he insisted that representatives of the communities in the mandated
countries should have places on the Mandates Commission, Barnes was still assum-
ing that the existing powers should have central roles. Hence the paternalist mind-set
544 P. Lamb

can still be detected in his thought. Nevertheless, once again, to consider his thought
utopian in general, is to overlook the radical ideas that make the application of
Carr’s utopian label unsatisfactory.

Conclusion
The Problems of Peace lectures more broadly present almost a microcosm of demo-
cratic internationalist thought in the 1920s and 1930s, in which democratic socialism
is represented strongly. This socialist internationalist subculture in inter-war interna-
tional thought received little attention in the discipline of International Relations for
several decades after the Second World War. This was in no small part the result of
the portrayal of non-realist ideas on international relations in the 1920s and 1930s in
indiscriminately utopian terms. The influence of Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis,
with its construal of the Left as utopian, and its central theme of a utopian/realist
dichotomy, set this misunderstanding in train.
Why, the question arises, did Carr ignore the distinctly non-utopian ideas of some
thinkers within the socialist movement that are clear to see in the Problems of Peace
lectures. Of course, the paternalism with regard to the colonies that one finds in
much democratic socialist thought of the period betrayed the limitations of the inter-
nationalist thought of the period. Nevertheless, had Carr given careful consideration
to the lectures presented from the socialist wing of liberal socialism he would not
have easily been able to dismiss them as utopian in general. Carr’s portrayal of the
Anglo-American, liberal tradition as utopian resulted from the profound influence
of Leninist and Stalinist Communism, notwithstanding his retreat from outright sup-
port for Stalin when the atrocities of the Soviet regime became clear to him.139
By ignoring the internationalist Left and implicitly encouraging his readers to do
likewise, Carr helped shape an academic discipline that failed to publicise some inno-
vative ideas that have been echoed in more recent international-relations discourse.
Brailsford’s analysis of relations between the powerful and less powerful, for exam-
ple, focused on attitudes, policies, and relations that would many years later be
criticised by postcolonial political thought. Laski contemplated a future interna-
tional system based on a radical functionalist programme. Attlee promoted an
understanding of peace as a positive condition, similar to thought that featured in
the discipline of Peace Studies several decades later. Carritt, in his philosophical way
of thinking, analysed international affairs in terms not unlike those of contemporary
normative international theory. Even without such innovative ideas, the democratic
Left of the inter-war era is worthy of attention for the alternative it offered to the
mainstream ideas which have been widely considered to constitute the alternative to
realism during the inter-war years. If we are to consider discourse about international
relations starting in this period as the first great debate of the discipline, the contribu-
tions of the Left to the Problems of Peace conferences serve to illustrate that this was
a far richer debate than was conventionally assumed for many years. Alternatives to
the traditional realist and liberal approaches to International Relations are today
considered to enliven what was for many decades an unnecessarily restricted disci-
pline. After the publication of the Twenty Years’ Crisis the radical democratic-
socialist approach that was an important subculture of inter-war international
thought had been neglected, thus helping to bring about such restriction. This meant
that the discipline was denied this alternative which would have helped create a richer
discourse.
 The International History Review 545

Notes
1. T. Taylor, ‘Utopianism’ in S. Smith (ed), International Relations: British and American
Perspectives (Oxford, 1985), 92–107.
2. L. M. Ashworth, Creating International Studies: Angell, Mitrany and the Liberal
Tradition (Aldershot, 1999), 106–29; L. M. Ashworth, ‘Where are the Idealists in Inter-
war International Relations’, Review of International Studies, xxxii (2006), 291–308;
P. Wilson, ‘The Myth of the First Great Debate’, Review of International Studies, xxiv
(1998), 1–15; C. Sylvest, ‘Continuity and Change in British Liberal Internationalism, c.
1900–1930’, Review of International Studies, xxxi (2005), 263–83; B. C. Schmidt,
‘Lessons from the Past: Reassessing the Interwar Disciplinary History of International
Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, xlii (1998), 433–59; C. G. Thies, ‘Progress,
History and Identity in International Relations Theory: the Case of the Idealist-Realist
Debate’, European Journal of International Relations, viii (1992), 147–85.
3. The internationalist ideas of this democratic Left are discussed in some detail in L. M.
Ashworth, International Relations and the Labour Party: Intellectuals and Policy Making
From 1918–1945 (London, 2007); L. M. Ashworth, ‘Rethinking a Socialist Foreign Pol-
icy: The British Labour Party and International Relations Experts, 1918 to 1931’, Inter-
national Labour and Working-Class History, lxxv (2009), 30–48; C. Sylvest, ‘Interwar
Internationalism, the Labour Party, and the Historiography of International Relations’,
International Studies Quarterly, xlviii (2004), 409–32.
4. In a brief, one-page review of the penultimate volume Carr acknowledged that this was the
twelfth in the annual series. The review consists of brief comments on the lectures, the most
significant that Angell’s entitled ‘How may League Principles be made Political Realities?’
does not really explain how this happens: E.H. Carr, ‘Review of Problems of Peace, Twelfth
series: Geneva and the Drift to War’, International Affairs, xvii (1938), 701–2 (702).
5. L. E. Ambrosius, ‘Woodrow Wilson, Alliances and the League of Nations’, The Journal
of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, v (2006), 139–65.
6. The Editor, ‘Introduction’ in Anon. (ed), The Problems of Peace (London, 1927), iii–viii,
v–vi.
7. Ibid., vii–viii.
8. E. H. Carr, ‘An Autobiography’ in M. Cox (ed), E.H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal
(Houndmills, 2000), xiii–xxii (xvi).
9. E. H. Carr, ‘The League of Peace and Freedom: an Episode in the Quest for Collective
Security’, International Affairs, xiv (1935), 837–44.
10. E. H. Carr, ‘Public Opinion As a Safeguard of Peace’, International Affairs, xv (1936),
846–62 (859–60).
11. A. Linklater, ‘E. H. Carr, Nationalism and the Future of the Sovereign State’ in M. Cox
(ed), E. H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal (Houndmills, 2000), 234–57.
12. Carr, ‘Autobiography’, xvi.
13. Ibid., xvii.
14. Ibid., xviii.
15. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 151-–2; Evans, ‘E.H. Carr and International Relations’, 89.
16. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 97.
17. E. Dell, A Strange Eventful History: Democratic Socialism in Britain (London, 2000),
77–8; G. Foote, The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History. 2nd ed. (London, 1986),
158–60, 178–80.
18. The Editor, ‘Introduction’, Problems of Peace. Sixth Series (London, 1932), vi; The
Editor, ‘Introduction’, Problems of Peace. Seventh Series (London, 1933), vii.
19. The Editor, ‘Introduction’, Problems of Peace. Sixth Series, vii.
20. Anonymous, ‘Editor’s Note’, Problems of Peace. Eleventh Series: The League and the
Future of the Collective System (London, 1937), vii.
21. F. P. Walters, ‘Introduction’, Problems of Peace. Twelfth Series: Geneva and the Drift to
War (London, 1938), 1–8.
22. C. W. J., ‘Introduction’, Problems of Peace. Thirteenth Series: War is not Inevitable
(London, 1938).
23. R. McKibbin, ‘The Economic Policy of the Second Labour Government 1929–31’, Past
and Present, lxviii (1975), 95–123; R. Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump: the Labour
Government of 1929–1931. 2nd ed. (London, 1994), 334–83.
546 P. Lamb

24. J. Callaghan, Socialism in Britain since 1884 (Cambridge, 1990), 103–36.

25. T. Dunne, ‘Theories as Weapons: E.H. Carr and International Relations’ in M. Cox
(ed), E. H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal (Houndmills, 2000), 217–33, 221–3.
26. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of Inter-
national Relations. 2nd ed. (Houndmills, 2001 [1945]), 13.
27. Ibid., 43.
28. Ibid., 31.
29. C. Jones, E.H. Carr and International Relations: A Duty to Lie (Cambridge, 1998),
54–60.
30. H. F. Bienfait and W. E. A. van Beek, ‘Right and Left as Political Categories: an Exer-
cise in “Not-so-Primitive” Classification’, Anthropos, xcvi (2001), 169–78.
31. M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford, 1996),
75–91.
32. W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition Volume Two: The Ideological Heritage
(London, 1983), 103–85.
33. Such thinkers are perceived as liberal internationalists in P. Rich, ‘Reinventing Peace:
David Davies, Alfred Zimmern and Liberal Internationalism in Interwar Britain’, Inter-
national Relations, xvi (2002), 117–33. They are however, described as liberal socialists
in L. M. Ashworth, ‘The Poverty of Paradigms: Subcultures, trading Zones and the
Case of Liberal Socialism in Interwar International Relations’, International Relations,
xxvi (2012), 35–59.
34. C. Delisle Burns, ‘Economic Causes of War’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of Peace. Fourth
Series (London, 1930), 86–110.
35. C. Delisle Burns, ‘The Need for National and International Economic Planning’ in
Anon. (ed), Problems of Peace. Seventh Series (London, 1933), 264–87.
36. C. Delisle Burns, ‘Authority and Force in the State System’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of
Peace. Eighth Series (London, 1933), 262–82.
37. Ashworth, ‘The Poverty of Paradigms’, 35–59.
38. E. F. Carritt, ‘Liberty and Equality’ in A. Quinton (ed), Political Philosophy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1967), 127–40.
39. E. F. Carritt, ‘The Ideological Conflict’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of Peace. Thirteenth
Series: War is not Inevitable (London, 1938), 178–95.
40. Carritt, ‘Ideological Conflict’, 194–5.
41. A Prichard, ‘What Can the Absence of Anarchism Tell Us About the History and
Purpose of International Relations?’, Review of International Studies, xxxvii (2011),
1647–69.
42. R. Palme Dutt, World Politics, 1918–1936 (London, 1936).
43. J. Stalin, Leninism: Volume One (London, 1928), 155–6.
44. R. W. Davies, ‘Carr’s Changing Views of the Soviet Union’ in M. Cox (ed), E.H. Carr:
A Critical Appraisal (Houndmills, 2000), 91–108, 102–3; M. Cox, ‘Introduction’ in E.
H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of Interna-
tional Relations, second edition (Houndmills, 2001 [1945]), xviii.
45. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 18–19.
46. Ibid., 19.
47. Dunne, ‘Theories as Weapons’, 226-–7.
48. Cox, ‘Introduction’, xvii–xxv.
49. Jones, E. H. Carr, 150–4; S. Molloy, ‘Dialectics and Transformation: Exploring the
International Theory of E.H. Carr’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Soci-
ety, xvii (2003), 279–306, 287–8; G. Evans, ‘E.H. Carr and International Relations’,
British Journal of International Studies, i (1975), 77–97, 80–2.
50. P. Howe, ‘The Utopian Realism of E.H. Carr’, Review of International Studies, xx
(1994), 277–97. He continued to advocate such mass democracy in 1942 in his book
Conditions of Peace (London, 1942), 14–36. By the time he wrote that book, he would
later concede, his views had changed. The book was ‘a sort of liberal utopia with a little
socialism but very little Marxism’. See Carr ‘An Autobiography’, xix.
51. P. Lamb, ‘Harold Laski (1893–1950): Political Theorist of a World in Crisis’, Review of
International Studies, xxv (1999), 329–42; P. Lamb, Harold Laski: Problems of Democ-
racy, the Sovereign State and International Society (New York, 2004).
 The International History Review 547

52. P. Wilson, The International Theory of Leonard Woolf: a Study in Twentieth-Century

Idealism (New York, 2003).
53. L. Woolf, ‘Introduction’ in L. Woolf (ed), The Intelligent Man’s Way to Prevent War
(London, 1933), 17.
54. Ibid., 16–17.
55. H. J. Laski, ‘The Economic Foundations of the Peace’ in L. Woolf (ed), The Intelligent
Man’s Way to Prevent War (London, 1933), 501.
56. A. Zimmern, ‘The Development of the International Mind’ in Anon. (ed), The Problems
of Peace (London, 1927), 1–17.
57. A. Zimmern, ‘Europe and the World Community’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of Peace.
Sixth Series (London, 1932), 114–33.
58. A. Zimmern, ‘The Influence of Public Opinion on Foreign Policy’ in Anon. (ed), Prob-
lems of Peace. Sixth Series (London, 1929), 299–320 (312).
59. See J. Morefield, ‘States Are Not People: Harold Laski on Unsettling Sovereignty,
Rediscovering Democracy’, Political Research Quarterly, lviii (2005), 659–69.
60. H. J. Laski, ‘International Government and National Sovereignty’ in Anon. (ed), Prob-
lems of Peace (London, 1927), 288-–312 (289).
61. Ibid., 289.
62. Ibid., 300.
63. Ibid., 288.
64. Ibid., 301.
65. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 101.
66. Laski, ‘International Government’, 300.
67. H. J. Laski, A Grammar of Politics (London, 1925), 587–666.
68. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 92.
69. Laski, Grammar of Politics, 20-21.
70. H. J. Laski, ‘The Theory of an International Society’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of Peace.
Sixth Series (London, 1932), 188–209 (189).
71. C. Sylvest, ‘Beyond the State? Pluralism and Internationalism in Early-Twentieth-
Century Britain’, International Relations, xxi (2007), 67–85.
72. Lamb, Harold Laski, 27–38; P. Lamb, ‘Laski’s Ideological Metamorphosis’, Journal of
Political Ideologies, iv (1999), 239–60.
73. Laski, ‘Theory of an International Society’, 204.
74. Ibid., 191.
75. Ibid., 192.
76. Ibid., 208.
77. Ibid., 195.
78. Ibid., 196.
79. Ibid., 200.
80. Ibid., 206.
81. For discussion of Mitrany’s functionalism see D. Anderson, ‘David Mitrany (1888–
1975): An Appreciation of his Life and Work’, Review of International Studies, xxiv
(1998), 577–92; M. F. Imber, ‘Re-Reading Mitrany: A Pragmatic Assessment of Sover-
eignty’, Review of International Studies, x (1984), 103–23; R. Tooze, ‘The Progress of
International Functionalism’, British Journal of International Studies, iii (1977), 210–17;
Ashworth, Creating International Studies.
82. Carr, Conditions of Peace, 246–74.
83. J. Morefield, ‘Harold Laski on the Habits of Imperialism’, Proceedings of the British
Academy, clv (2009), 213–37.
84. M. Newman, Harold Laski: a Political Biography (Houndmills, 1993), 110–21.
85. G. Rosen, ‘Herbert Morrison’ in K. Jefferys (ed), Labour Forces: From Ernie Bevin to
Gordon Brown (London, 2002), 25–40, 30–33.
86. P. Noel-Baker, ‘The Future of the Collective System’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of Peace.
Tenth Series: Anarchy or World Order (London, 1936), 178-–98, 179.
87. N. Angell, ‘Pacifism is Not Enough’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of Peace. Ninth Series:
Pacifism is Not Enough (London, 1935), 128–49; N. Angell, ‘How May League Princi-
ples be Made Political Realities?’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of Peace. Twelfth Series:
Geneva and the Drift to War (London, 1938), 133–45. N. Angell, ‘Current Criticisms of
548 P. Lamb

the Peace Front’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of Peace. Twelfth Series: Geneva and the Drift
to War (London, 1938), 199–207.
88. Angell, ‘Current Criticisms’, 206–7.
89. M. Ceadel, ‘The Founding Text of International Relations? Norman Angell’s Seminal
yet Flawed The Great Illusion (1909–1938)’, Review of International Studies, xxxvii
(2011), 1671–93 (1676).
90. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 51.
91. Ibid., 77.
92. H. Morrison, ‘A New Start with the League of Nations’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of
Peace. Eleventh Series: the League and the Future of the Collective System (London,
1937), 5–27 (26).
93. Ibid., 6.
94. Ibid., 8–9.
95. G. W. Egerton, ‘Collective Security as Political Myth: Liberal Internationalism and the
League of Nations in Politics and History’, The International History Review’, v (1983),
496–524.
96. Carr, Twenty-Years’ Crisis, 8, 31, 105.
97. Carr, ‘Public Opinion’, 859–60.
98. Morrison, ‘A New Start’, 14.
99. Ibid., 14–16.
100. Ibid., 26–7.
101. Ibid., 24–7.
102. Ibid., 23.
103. N. Thomas-Symonds, Attlee: A Life in Politics (London, 2010), 69–71.
104. C. R. Attlee, ‘The Socialist View of Peace’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of Peace. Ninth
Series: Pacifism is not Enough (London, 1935), 96–127.
105. Ibid., 96.
106. M. Stohl and M. Chamberlain, ‘Alternative Futures for Peace Research’, The Journal of
Conflict Resolution, xvi (1972), 523–30.
107. Attlee, ‘Socialist View of Peace’, 96.
108. Ibid., 97.
109. Ibid., 110.
110. Ibid., 114–16.
111. Ibid. 124–7.
112. Thomas-Symonds, Attlee, 64.
113. J. Schneer, ‘Hopes Deferred or Shattered: The British Labour Left and the Third Force
Movement, 1945–49’, The Journal of Modern History, lvi (1984), 197–226.
114. A. Potts, Zilliacus: A Life for Peace and Socialism (London, 2002), 140–1.
115. M. K. Zilliacus, ‘The Nature and Working of the League of Nations’ in Anon. (ed),
Problems of Peace. Fourth Series (London, 1930), 1–21, 4.
116. Ibid., 18.
117. K. Zilliacus, ‘The League and the World To-day’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of Peace.
Thirteenth Series: War is not Inevitable (London, 1938), 257–84 (257).
118. Potts, Zilliacus, 57.
119. Zilliacus, ‘The League and the World To-day’, 257–8.
120. Ibid., 275–6.
121. Ibid., 278.
122. Ibid., 281.
123. Ibid., 282.
124. P. Lamb, ‘Henry Noel Brailsford’s Radical International Relations Theory’, Interna-
tional Relations, xxv (2011), 477–96 (490).
125. C. Delisle Burns, ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of Peace.
Second Series (London, 1928), 336–60; C. Delisle Burns, ‘The British Commonwealth
and the League of Nations’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of Peace. Third Series (London,
1929), 208–41.
126. H. N. Brailsford, ‘The Rise of Nationalism in the East’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of
Peace. Second Series (London, 1928), 318–35.
 The International History Review 549

127. R. Abrahamsen, ‘Postcolonialism’ in M. Griffiths, (ed), International Relations Theory for

the Twenty-First Century (Abingdon, 2007), 111–22; S. N. Grovogui, ‘Postcolonialism’ in
T. Dunne, M. Kurki and S. Smith (eds), International Relations Theories: Discipline and
Diversity. 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2010), 238–56.
128. Brailsford, ‘Rise of Nationalism’, 329–32.
129. Ibid., 335.
130. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 77.
131. Sean Molloy, ‘Dialectics and Transformation’, 286, 287, 299, 305.
132. Brailsford, ‘Rise of Nationalism’, 318–24.
133. J. Lewin, ‘Leonard Barnes, the Man and his Books’, African Affairs, lxxiv (1975), 483–4.
134. L. Barnes, ‘The Future of Imperialism’ in Anon. (ed), Problems of Peace. Eleventh
Series: the League and the Future of the Collective System (London, 1937), 180–97 (188).
135. Ibid., 185.
136. Ibid., 186–93.
137. Ibid., 193.
138. Ibid., 194.
139. Carr, ‘Autobiography’, xviii–xix.